Don't Let Him Know

For my sister Basabi who taught me the pleasure of reading stories.

For my mother Reba who told me stories.

And for Greg who listened to my stories.

Don’t let him know she liked them best,

For this must ever be

A secret, kept from all the rest,

Between yourself and me.

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Contents

A Happy Meal

Ring of Spices

The Games Boys Play

The Discipline of Haircuts

Great-Grandmother’s Mango Chutney

Father’s Blessing

The Gifts of Summer

White Christmas

Requiem for a Star

Invitation to a Party

The Practical Thing to Do

The Scene of the Crime

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

I

A Happy Meal

‘Ma,’ said Amit, ‘I have to talk to you about something.’

Dinner was over. Romola and Amit were alone in the kitchen. She was putting away the leftovers while Amit wiped the kitchen counters. June was upstairs with Neel and his homework. The last traces of a California evening still dappled the neighbourhood in tranquil honeyed light. Romola could hear the hiss of a hose as their neighbour, Mr Nguyen, watered his lawn. Somewhere a little dog barked.

‘What is it, son?’ She put down the leftovers and turned to him. ‘Is anything wrong?’

She could sense he was struggling with something. She wondered if he was having fights with June. Perhaps June didn’t want her here any more, she thought worriedly, though it had only been two weeks since she had arrived from Calcutta.

It had been a long time since the two of them had talked – just her and Amit. Even when Avinash had died and Amit had made the long journey back to Calcutta for his father’s funeral, they had never really talked. Oh sure, they had discussed Avinash’s stocks and shares and what to do with his bank account and who to invite to the funeral but that was not really talking.

‘What a good boy that Amit is, such a dutiful son,’ everyone told her. ‘You are a lucky mother.’ She would smile and say, ‘That I am.’ But they never talked, not like they did when he’d come running back from school and plant himself on her stomach while she lay in bed taking her afternoon nap and launch into long stories of schoolyard fights and teacher sagas. She had been his confidante then on lazy summer afternoons, half-listening to his convoluted long-winded stories while the fan whirred sluggishly overhead.

‘Ma, remember I brought back a bunch of my old books and diaries from India?’

She remembered. Several years after Avinash died, she had finally got around to going through the closets and had found a shoebox filled with old diaries. They were Amit’s and she’d started reading them, smiling at little-boy accounts of school friends and birthday parties until the dust made her eyes water and her throat sore. She’d put them aside for later and had forgotten all about them. She remembered mentioning them to Amit but had no idea he had lugged them back to California.

‘Well, there was one of your old address books in there somehow,’ said Amit.

‘Oh, really?’ She shrugged. ‘But an address book that old is useless anyway. All the phone numbers must have changed. Half the people are probably dead. Just throw it away.’

‘It’s not the address book,’ said Amit. ‘I found this in it. I think it’s just the last page. I don’t know where the rest is.’

He wordlessly handed the letter to her.

The paper was almost translucent with age, but the handwriting was still clear, the ink Royal Blue. She recognized it with a jolt, even though it had been almost four decades. She remembered exactly where she was the day she had first seen that letter. Funny, she was in America then as well, a newly arrived bride in her neatly ordered kitchen trying to organize her spice jars. Until that letter arrived and turned everything upside down.

I wanted to surprise you by telling you I had finally secured admission to graduate school in the United States. I guess the surprise ended up being mine, getting your wedding invitation. I was hoping that once we were there away from the prying eyes of families we’d be able to live the life we dreamed about during those evenings in Calcutta.

Now it tastes like dust in my mouth. I feel betrayed that you couldn’t be stronger. Couldn’t you have waited longer? Or did you feel, since whatever we had was a secret anyway, we could just carry on as before? Hadn’t we promised to be together, the world be damned? Did you think it was just a phase we’d outgrow like children do with their clothes?

I never asked you to tell the world. I just hoped you might wait for me. I wrote and rewrote this letter three times wondering whether I’d ever send it. I don’t really expect you to reply.

Yours

Sumit

Romola sat there in Amit’s armchair slightly stunned. After all these years how could she have been so careless? She knew she had saved the letter, unable to destroy it the way she should have years ago. She remembered reading it and rereading it, each word striking her like a sledgehammer, cracking her open over and over again. She had always meant to throw it away, shred it, but somehow she never could. She had hidden it instead – stashed away like a secret pain. But she had never meant Amit to see it. She sat there speechless wondering what to say. This was like one of those terrible television shows she saw during the day where the wife would confess that their little girl wasn’t her husband’s and the studio audience would gasp in horror.

‘Ma,’ said Amit, as if reaching across a great divide. ‘Ma, tell me about Sumit Uncle. It is the same Sumit Uncle who once came from America to visit, isn’t it?’

Romola stared at him shocked. No, she thought, this couldn’t be happening, not now. The past she always thought could be wiped clean like a kitchen counter if you were careful enough. She had wanted no shadow of it to fall on Amit, to haunt his dreams. Once he told her that he never dreamed. He said he woke up every morning, his mind as clear as a cloudless summer sky, unremittingly bright in its glare. Was it her, she had wondered. Had she wiped the past clean with such determination that she had given her son only a gift of dreamlessness?

But how could she explain everything to Amit now? Did any of it matter any more? Avinash, her husband, his father, was dead. She was sitting here, a widow in her sixties in a suburban kitchen in California while the late summer evening turned golden. As for Sumit, who knew where Sumit was any more? Was he even alive or, like Avinash, dead from a sudden heart attack?

‘It’s okay, Ma.’ Amit awkwardly put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I think you were incredibly brave to do what you did – to give up Sumit Uncle for Baba.’ Romola stared at him, confused. She wanted him to stop but he kept talking. ‘We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But did father know about him? I thought they were friends.’

Romola let his words sink in. She was an adulteress in his eyes, she thought. How had that happened? No, no, she wanted to tell him. You have it all wrong. Anger welled up in her. How quick they were to assume everything was always her fault. Avinash’s face floated into her head. And Sumit’s. She didn’t know who she was angrier with but she clenched her fists to keep her hands still.

She wanted to protest her innocence but the past seemed too complicated to explain now, full of serrated edges that could rip everything to shreds. She twisted the border of her sari in her hand and shook her head, wondering how it had come to be that Amit was asking the questions and she was the one rummaging for excuses.

It was so long ago, she could say. It was just a momentary foolishness, could be another explanation. It’s not what you think. It’s all lies. You misunderstand. The babble of voices in her head grew louder and louder, their urgent tones more and more shrill, criss-crossing like anxious telephone wires. But nothing seemed right, even to her own ears, each explanation weaker than the previous one, tissue-wrapped in white lies, the cracks showing through the arguments even before she could utter them.

Then she looked at Amit’s face and saw something she had not seen for many years in his eyes. He was trying to connect to her, as tentative as the first ghostly little toadstools that sprang up after the monsoon deluge.

He is not angry, she thought in baffled wonder feeling someone had unexpectedly overturned a judgement. He doesn’t even seem upset.

‘Yes.’ She gingerly tested out the legs of each word to see if it could bear the weight of the past without collapsing. ‘Your father knew about Sumit, of course. But that was so long ago.’

‘I think it’s so great we can talk like this, you know,’ he said. ‘Like adults, one on one. I never thought I’d be able to with you. Now I finally feel like I know you so much better. It’s like a huge cloud lifted from over us.’

She stared at him bemusedly. In her son’s eyes she was now a mysterious woman with an alluring past, not just his ageing mother with an arthritic knee.

‘Well, you know, Amit, your parents weren’t always old fuddy-duddies who only cared about your grades. We had our pasts too.’

‘I know, but we never talk about it,’ Amit sounded almost excited. ‘Ma, I never told you, but June and I were having some problems. I went to see a therapist. It was her idea but I was depressed and felt like I could never hold a relationship together. And the therapist asked me about your and Baba’s marriage. And I said I think it was happy but I realized I didn’t really know anything. Was it?’

‘You went to see a therapist?’ Romola ignored his question. ‘Why?’

‘Oh Ma, it doesn’t matter now. But now that I know about all this, it explains so much about you. And me.’

‘It does?’ Romola was still trying to navigate the unexpected turn the conversation had taken.

‘It totally does,’ said Amit. ‘I know all this sounds like American psychobabble but I needed to know you as a person, not just my mother. But tell me: why couldn’t you just marry Sumit Uncle? Did you know him before you married Baba?’

Romola looked at her son. His hair was receding and in the evening light she saw traces of his father in his face. She didn’t want to explain anything. She was tired, so tired of always being the one who had to smooth things over, the one who had to keep everything running.

‘It just wasn’t possible,’ she said finally. ‘That was a different time. We had to listen to our parents, unlike you all.’ But she smiled to let him know she didn’t hold it against him for having settled in California, for marrying an American named June, for not naming her grandson Shilajeet as she had wanted but Neel – a name she regarded as bland and colourless, its Indianness discreet as if it did not want to disturb the placidity of their American suburbia.

Amit smiled back and then handed her the letter. ‘Keep the letter,’ he said. She ran her fingers over it, smoothing out the creases.

‘You know,’ he leaned forward. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you something for days and now I think I can.’

Romola looked at him expectantly, bracing herself for whatever it was.

‘I am thinking of quitting my job and studying to be a chef.’

‘A what?’ Romola gasped.

‘Chef, you know, like a gourmet cook.’

‘I know what a chef is,’ she said impatiently. ‘I watch TV too. But why do you want to be a cook? You are a computer engineer.’

‘I know but cooking is what I want to do,’ said Amit. ‘It’s about following your heart, you know.’

She didn’t know, she thought. ‘But you studied computer science in America,’ she said, as if to reassure herself. Then a dreadful suspicion crept into her voice. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he laughed. ‘But that doesn’t mean I can never do anything else. Anyway, it’s not like anyone ever asked me what I wanted to do. I got into computer science and that was that. You and Baba were so excited and pleased I just went along with it.’

‘What does June think?’

‘She knows it will be tough. But she thinks I should do what I need to do,’ he replied. ‘Maybe it will help our marriage even. Things had been tough, Ma.’

What a strange country, thought Romola. He wants to cook his way back into his marriage. And then a sudden lick of annoyance flared up in her. How dare he dig up old infidelities and hurts to give himself permission to quit his good computer job and learn cooking?

‘But you never even stepped into the kitchen when you were a boy in Calcutta,’ she said. ‘What do you even know of cooking?’

‘I’d love to cook, Ma, if only you’d let me step into the kitchen,’ he said sharply. ‘Ever since you came you’ve just taken it over. I’ve learned to cook in America and I really enjoy it.’

‘You do?’ she stared at him as if he was a stranger. Chefs were perfectly coiffed celebrities like Madhur Jaffrey in beautiful silk saris, not Amit. She couldn’t imagine him on television with an apron around him talking about sautéing chicken breasts and marinating kebabs.

‘It’s like meditation,’ he said. ‘It calms me.’ Then he paused and said, ‘And maybe you can teach me now. I could watch you and maybe we’ll even re-create your recipes, write a cookbook together – Bengali Meals for an American Kitchen. Wouldn’t that be fun, just you and me?’

Romola smiled and shook her head gently at herself. She had been afraid she had lost Amit to America. Who would have thought that accursed letter from so long ago would bring him back to her? They used to call him her little tail when he was a toddler because he’d follow her everywhere. Today he was looking at her with those same eyes again as if she knew the answers and could wrap him in the love of her sari.

She smiled at him and threw up her hands.

‘Don’t you feel better?’ he said. ‘Now you don’t have to keep all that locked away, a secret any more?’

She did feel better, she thought.

‘If you tell me Sumit Uncle’s last name and where he lived in America, I could try and track him down on the Internet,’ said Amit.

‘No, no,’ Romola startled herself with the urgency in her tone. ‘You must not. Promise me you won’t start digging all that up. He might be dead, married, who knows? That chapter is over.’

‘Okay, okay,’ Amit shrugged. ‘It was just an idea. I thought it might be cool. Ma, you know you’ve done all your duties. You’ve raised me. You took care of Baba. You wouldn’t even take any money for the funeral.’

That American word ‘cool’ made her shiver. How Ameri–can her son had become. She wondered if he really meant it. He hugged her before going to bed that night. He never did that she thought as she distractedly put away the leftovers.

All night long she tossed and turned. Once she woke up filled with sharp-toothed anger. Pshaw, she thought to herself. Amit was right. She had done everything everyone expected her to do. If no one had ever asked him if he wanted to study computers, no one had ever asked her if she wanted to do anything at all. All she had ever got to decide was what fish to serve for lunch and whether to have chicken or mutton for dinner. Now after Avinash’s death, not even that. Rui, paarshey, ilish, the fish of her childhood, all gone. Who asked me whether I wanted to give them up? she thought angrily. No one. But when she did no one had told her not to.

For a moment that anger rose again, inky dark, from the pit of her stomach, dredging up bits and pieces of the past, like unabsorbed pills, their cheery candy-coloured coating long gone, just the bitterness now, still there after all these years, little pills of bitterness.

By the time the sky turned light the anger had ebbed away and she fell asleep. She tossed restlessly, her dreams full of fish in Calcutta swimming through Amit’s giant television screen. The blonde weather person was telling her about fish prices and pizzas and burgers with a fake sunny smile and then she suddenly morphed into Amit, and Romola, startled, jabbed blindly at buttons on the remote control and the whole screen turned solid unblinking guilty blue. She opened her eyes and she saw the blue was the cheerful pastel of the California sky framed in the window by her bed. She sat up in bed and felt for her glasses. As she brushed her teeth she looked at herself in the mirror. There were lines around her eyes, feathery wrinkles. The skin around her neck was starting to sag. She could see the web of wrinkles there as well, like a crushed-crêpe sari. Her hair was turning grey. How thin it had become, she thought. She could see her scalp through the strands. She had never smeared red sindoor on her parting, like some women she knew, as a sign of her marriage. She’d preferred a discreet smudge of red. But without even that her parting looked shockingly naked.

‘What are you going to do today, Ma?’ said Amit as he usually did every morning. Even though her back was to him as she waited for the water for her tea to boil, Romola knew he was not looking at her. He would be glancing through the newspaper while he absently poured cold skim milk straight from a carton into his cereal, more often than not Rice Krispies.

It was another cloudless California morning, the sky spotlessly blue, laundered by the early morning sunlight as it had been every morning since she got here a fortnight back from Calcutta. But the linoleum on the kitchen floor was cold, seeping in through the hole in her grey sock while the stainless steel kettle purred on the stove. Normally she would never have her tea until she had been to the bathroom and had a wash. But she knew better than to try and insert herself in the carefully timed and choreographed morning drill of getting ready for the day.

Soon Amit would leave the kitchen and she would hear the whine of his electric shaver, the spluttering gurgle of her daughter-in-law’s coffee percolating, her grandson chattering through mouthfuls of Froot Loops. As usual.

Except today wasn’t usual. Romola curled her foot against the cold floor and pulled her blue cardigan tighter around the crumpled white sari. She stared at Amit, wanting to ask him if last night had all been a dream.

‘Why don’t you eat some breakfast?’ she asked instead. ‘How can you survive on just coffee and cereal? Let me make some toast.’

She knew he wouldn’t have any. He never did. But it was part of the routine, part of the play of pretending everything was normal. Soon Neel’s hair would be brushed and June would have changed into her business suit. Then they would leave. But not before the last-minute instructions: ‘Ma, yesterday’s leftovers are in the refrigerator. Don’t forget to heat them for two minutes in the microwave first. And don’t put the plates with the gold rim in the microwave. If anyone calls just ask them to call again and leave a message on the answering machine. Say bye to your grandma, Neel.’ The door would bang shut. She would hear the rattle of the garage door opening and then Amit’s car coughing into life. She would stand at the window and watch June help Neel into the child seat in her car. She would half-raise her hand in goodbye and then drop it. No one was really looking.

And then for a moment it was silent. The quiet rose warmly throughout the house, rushing in to fill the spaces that had been so frantic and busy five minutes ago. The first time, she had just leaned back against the door letting the quiet curl around her feet and rise around her. But now she hurried across the living room to turn on the TV. It had become a habit. She stubbed her toe on a piece of Lego Neel had left lying on the floor and said ‘Uff’ but she did not stop till she reached the television and turned it on. The familiar face of that talk-show host with grey hair and glasses sputtered into view.

‘Aah,’ she sighed and sat down on the couch. The host was talking with a young woman who was obviously pregnant. That’s right. She remembered – the show was going to be about young woman who were pregnant with a child by men other than their husbands.

Oh, thought Romola, I hope I did not miss the bit when they bring out the husband to confront the wife. The audience was hissing and booing at the young woman. But she did not seem to care. Romola looked at the carefully-drawn arched brows, the shocking pink halter-top and shook her head. Look at her, she thought. Six months pregnant with another man’s child and look how she dresses. She quivered, though whether with righteous indignation or secret relish, she was not quite sure.

But today she felt something was missing. She felt restless and the television couldn’t just sweep her away into its brightly coloured world of sordid affairs and illicit sex. She imagined herself in there and a flicker of a smile crossed her face. ‘Sons reunite mothers with ex-lovers’ could be the theme she thought. Wouldn’t Leela in Connecticut get a shock if she turned on the TV and saw Romola there? But the moment passed and Romola realized that today she couldn’t blank her head with a remote like she usually did. ‘What can I do?’ she said, sounding like Amit when he was a little boy on the first day of the long seemingly never-ending expanse of his summer vacation.

‘Well,